Q) How Do I Get The Best Draft Results From The Machine?

A) To get the best results from The Machine for your draft, you should prepare in advance and become familiar with how to interpret The Machine’s recommendations.

Here is a pre-draft check list designed to help you prepare in advance:

Purchase The Machine at least one or two days before your draft. The Machine is easy to learn and easy to use, nevertheless you want to be 100% sure you know how to operate it BEFORE your draft begins.

Load your league into The Machine and check that it understands your league rules correctly by viewing the pages under League Setup. Especially review Starting Lineup Requirements and Scoring Rules. Make any adjustments necessary and save to the Advanced Sports Logic server. Here are instructions to help you find your link to The Machine from within your CBS Sports App Central, MyFantasyLeague, or RealTime Fantasy Sports league.

Take time to become familiar with The Machine’s features, especially the features available in “Draft” mode, which include Simulated Draft and Draft Recommendations. Run Draft Recommendations in manual mode so you become familiar with how recommendations will appear during your live draft. In your actual live draft, this page is hands-free. Just navigate to the page and The Machine does the rest.

This gives Advanced Sports Logic’s support team time to help you and address any issues or concerns BEFORE your draft begins.

Here are ways to optimize the recommendations you receive from The Machine:

Check player health or for any other issues that might make a player’s performance questionable. Our projection providers update their projections frequently. However, they can still be delayed from the latest breaking news or they may not properly reflect a risky condition of a player, such as contract disputes or marginal health.

If you are familiar with the average draft position (ADP) of your league, you can sometimes defer top recommendations a round or two when you know no one in your league will select a player in that position for another round. This is something commonly done with respect to Defense and Kickers. However, in recent years draft strategies are changing and now even a good defense or a good kicker is now going earlier than a few years back.

Usually pick from one of the top three recommendations that The Machine provides. The number to the right of each recommendation represents what your probability to win will be immediately after selecting that player. If the top players are all close together, then just select your favorite among them. If the spread of win probabilities is far apart, then select only from players among the highest win probabilities.

In later rounds, if the top five players are very close to each other, and four are an RB and one is a WR, all things being equal, take the WR because a decent running back will likely still be available later, but the WR will be gone. Remember to verify the latest player news, to make sure there isn't a reason this WR has fallen.